President Barack Obama and Congress have vowed to fix the rising costs of health care, and to get more people insured. But the details in the liberal plans offered so far do not solve the problems of Americas health care system.

Liberal Rhetoric

If you like your health care package you can keep it: The President says that a public option a government plan would just be one of many health care plans that Americans could select. In fact, a public plan will lead many employers to drop private health coverage for their workers and dump them into the public plan just as many employers in the 1990s pushed their workers into cheaper managed care plans. According to independent analyses, as many as 119 million Americans could end up in a public plan. This is hardly letting people keep what they have.

The end goal is not a single payer system: The single payer here is Uncle Sam, using taxpayers money, and not just paying the bills but calling the shots and deciding what care every American will getor not get. The inclusion of a public option is nothing more than a Trojan horse. The architects of the Presidents proposals, and the sponsors of his proposals on Capitol Hill, know that once a government plan is in place, private insurance companies will be eventually run out of business.

The quality of your health care will get better: One need only look at current government health programs to test this premise. Medicare has huge gaps in coverage. Medicaids quality is notoriously bad. They both offer substandard care compared to most private insurance plans. These persistent deficiencies are routinely overlooked in discussions of a government health plan. Rather than fixing Medicare and Medicaid, what the government proposes is to make these programs the foundations of a universal plan.

Colossal Costs

Analysts, including the non-partisan Congressional Budget OfficeCongresss own watchdoghave issued preliminary estimates that the cost could be high as $2 trillion over 10 years, with most of that borrowed money. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that the annual cost of the insurance subsidy program in an early version of the Kennedy-Dodd bill would rise 6.7 percent per year after it is fully phased in. There is nothing in the legislation that would lead one to expect that pace to slow after the first decade.

For real solutions, and not just rousing rhetoric, check out The Heritage Foundation’s health care website.